Growing up in the 50s, unlike today, meant that there weren’t many organized activities to choose from when we had time on our hands. I lived in an apartment building in the Bronx. Adjacent to it was a small park consisting of some benches, and a sandbox. There was some land around the park that included a stream and untouched woods. For the most part this was where my friends from the apartment and I had to figure out what to do when we were bored and didn’t want to travel very far.
A hill itself that that our apartment building was built on extended past one side of the building, untouched. The section of the hill that was just adjacent to the apartment was great for dirt sledding. It was very steep and mainly dirt. There were no rocks or trees to get in your way, until it reached the park at the bottom. Dirt sledding is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of using a wooden sled, as you would on snow in the winter, you would use a broken apart cardboard box, the bigger the better. You sat on your cardboard, folded up the front end so you had something to hold onto and let fly. The dirt had to be the right consistency for your cardboard sled to work well. The friction caused by dirt and cardboard would make for rough sailing, stopping the sled well before the bottom of the hill. The best part was when the sled stopped and you didn’t. We got rather dirty when we sled this way. Unfortunately we didn’t have much access to large cardboard boxes, so we didn’t get to play this very often.
This was not the hill we sledded on in winter when it was snow-covered. We would have gone too fast and surely hit one of the trees or rocks in the park at the bottom.
Continuing further away from our dirt sledding part of the hill were trees and boulders that one could climb, make forts out of, and hide out in when you played games like “Hide and Seek” and “Hounds and Hares”. This is a picture of the hill as it looks today with somewhat more vegetation than we had back then.
As a child I loved to climb. Playing in those rocks was a favorite past-time, until someone decided to put a house on the dirt sledding part of the hill. The rest of the rocks and trees remained.
There was a paved pathway from one of the upper streets to the bottom where the park was. You can see the edge of it in the right side of the picture. The fence that blocked off one edge wasn’t there when I was a kid. This was the path we used for snow sledding. If you were lucky you made it all the way to the street, if not, you stopped midway or hit a rock or two along the way. It was best used when there was a lot of packed snow. Once it had been used too often the snow wore down to the cement pathway and you didn’t go very far. Periodically we would shovel more snow onto sections of the path to create a bump to fly over.
The park itself and local woods provided other sources of entertainment. Some of which I will write about on some future occasion.
